Webinar recap: Continuous Testing in a DevOps World

A great big thank you to everyone who joined us for our webinar, Continuous Testing in a DevOps World! With increasing complexity of products and the constant need for faster delivery, modern software development processes have changed significantly. With more than 1200 registrants, the overwhelming amount of participation for this webinar truly proved that this is an important topic to project teams. We truly appreciate everyone taking time of their busy schedules to attend! In case you missed the live webinar, keep reading below for a quick summary.

Moving beyond traditional QA, DevOps culture has fueled the agile movement by improving collaboration between teams, which results in faster time to market. Continuous testing can immensely assist project teams in improving software quality at each step of development, which results in fewer defects and errors when released.

In this 60 minute webinar we were very lucky to have very knowledgeable thought-leaders, Neeraj Tripathi, VP of Global QA of Infor, and Vinay Chandra, Managing Director, Systems Integration of Deloitte Consulting, as well as Zephyr’s VP of Marketing, Francis Adanza, discuss the topic of DevOps testing, the elements of the DevOps journey and key metrics for measuring success.

As we do with all our webinars, we ran polls throughout the discussion and our first poll asked the audience, “From an overall agile DevOps maturity standpoint, where would you say your organization is in its agile/DevOps stages?” More than half, at 65%, answered that their organizations are just getting started with Agile and DevOps. Only 9% have fairly matured processes, 18% have significantly leveraged and 9% aren’t using it at all. The panelists were not surprised with the results and hope that the webinar will help more teams gain insight in making the transition.

To define agile, the panelists explained that it is a method of building software to respond quickly on changes and ability to do incremental releases over big-bang releases. While DevOps on the other hand, is about delivery business value by close collaboration with Development and IT Operations. Neeraj pointed out that one is essential to the other. Next, the panelists looked at the difference between DevOps and the traditional software development lifecycle (SDLC). Planning and execution in traditional SDLC is based on tasks and stages, while DevOps is all about identifying and delivering business value.

Our second poll discovered that a majority of the audience’s testing organization is a hybrid with some level of centralized governance and or are completely integrated with development. In DevOps, testing is no longer at the end of the SDLC and automation becomes essential. It really requires teams to be more collaborative and to work together in a constant feedback manner. DevOps benefits testing and QA by improving communication, providing more insight on the project from all angles, and increasing faster time to market as well as reducing risks of product market fit.

Some key aspects that enable DevOps adoption are source control tools, stable infrastructure and build processes as well as test automation. However, the panelists also explain risks to consider with DevOps in the form of an acronym, R.A.C.I: responsible, accountable, consult and inform.

After exploring some tips and tricks to getting started with DevOps, the final part of the webinar concluded with an examination of key metrics to measure DevOps success. Some of these included customer satisfaction, frequency of deployments, reduction in client facing defects and automation for test, build, and deployment.